"Rising with the Tide of History": the Age of Sail As Industrial Alibi
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“RISING WITH THE TIDE OF HISTORY”: THE AGE OF SAIL AS INDUSTRIAL ALIBI __________ Claire Campbell Network in Canadian History and Environment Department of History York University 2140 Vari Hall 4700 Keele Street Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3 http://niche-canada.org Campbell, Claire. ““Rising with the Tide of History”: The Age of Sail as Industrial Alibi” Papers in Canadian History and Environment, no. 2 (May 2019): 1-37. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.25071/10315/36212 ““Rising with the Tide of History”: The Age of Sail as Industrial Alibi” by Claire Campbell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Papers in Canadian History and Environment Editors: Jennifer Bonnell, Sean Kheraj, and Owen Temby Papers in Canadian History and Environment is an open-access, peer- reviewed occasional research paper series published by NiCHE. It features article-length research papers that examine any aspect of the historical relationships among people and the rest of nature in Canada. ISSN 2561-54 “RISING WITH THE TIDE OF HISTORY”: THE AGE OF SAIL AS INDUSTRIAL ALIBI Claire Campbell Figure 1. Proposed design, Queen’s Marque, queensmarque.com. Courtesy The Armour Group Limited. IN THE FALL OF 2016, construction began on the third major condominium project on the twenty-first-century Halifax harbour. Queen’s Marque— like Bishop’s Landing (2003) and the ongoing King’s Wharf (2010) before it—repackages the core of the city’s waterfront into the opportunity to purchase property “pressed up against the ocean.” Throughout its marketing Queen’s Marque stresses its local identity as a way to justify its occupation of the waterfront, in everything from its name to its motifs and materials (Figure 1). This section of the Halifax harbourfront had, in fact, been reserved for the Crown since the end of the eighteenth century. The design of the new project includes two arms meant to invoke hulls “breaching the waves,” with a harbour light installation between them. And reaching further, the promotional materials situate Queen’s Marque in a Campbell | 1 Figure 2. Queen’s Marque under construction, 6 May 2018. Photo by the author. tradition of regional opportunity—or opportunism. Atlantic Canada, this new development tells us, “rose with the tide of history,” when privateers wielded the royal marque to “legally claim the bounty of this land and establish settlements on it.” Its twenty-first-century namesake promises to see the harbourfront, and presumably the city, rise again in “a new era of growth and prosperity in Atlantic Canada.”1 The expression “rising with the tide of history” suggests an eventual triumph, and with wonderfully passive inevitability. It asks nothing of us, and instead invokes a presumably renewable source of energy, in tidal power. Indeed, the Bay of Fundy—only an hour’s drive from Halifax—sees the highest tides in the world. There are, however, three substantial and troubling ironies here. For one, tidal generation in Fundy remains at the research stage, despite a century of proposals, because the tides have proven too strong for turbines.2 Second, construction on the cofferdams at Queen’s Marque has already had to contend with rising sea levels, propelled “Rising with the Tide of History” | 2 by climate change brought on by the use of fossil fuels (Figure 2).3 Third, and most importantly, even as projects like Queen’s Marque attempt to revive and display elements of coastal history—in ways that suggest that this history offers inspiration for more appropriate and sustainable ways of coastal living—the province of Nova Scotia, like its counterparts in the federation and the federal government of Canada, remains committed to aggressively pursuing fossil fuel extraction offshore.4 It is worth remembering that a rising tide can bring trepidation as well as opportunity. Here it carries a tangled history of power and unresolved contradictions. Canada has more coastline than any other country in the world: according to Statistics Canada, 243,042 kilometres on three oceans. Yet we have never had an environmental history of Canada as a coastal state, one that considers the role of coastlines in the national project or our national identity.5 In both popular and scholarly histories of Canada (and the United States, for that matter) coastlines feature most prominently in the age of “discovery” and the age of sail. They then fade from the story as national attention turns to continental expansion, from sea to sea—a moment that coincides precisely with the acceleration of the Anthropocene. I want to argue instead that the Atlantic coast has been highly useful to Canada as a nation-state after Confederation in 1867. As at Queen’s Marque, the age of sail has served to legitimate the development ethos so central to both the nation-building project and the Anthropocene writ large. As we see in debates over pipelines in and from the west, the development ethos continues to define the prevailing view of “national interest,” as it has done since the mid-nineteenth century. But this story is not only a western (or northern) one. There has been a concurrent commitment to seeing the Atlantic horizon as a frontier; as historian Arthur Lower wrote exaltedly in 1953, “For nothing can eliminate our frontier, that vast land to the north there.… And as to the sea!… Is it not a Campbell | 3 frontier, too, which calls out all the resources and ingenuity and adaptiveness of man?”6 At the same time, as with images of northern wilderness or mountain parks, we have continued to depict the Atlantic coastline in ways that suggest a harmony with a nature greater than ourselves. The schooner—most famously, but not exclusively, the Bluenose—is quintessentially Canadian, not because of the dime or a Heritage Minute: rather, it appears on the dime because of how successfully it embodies this phenomenon of romancing extraction. The enormous investments in and catches from the Grand Banks fishery – the site and symbol, in many ways, of environmental crisis in Atlantic Canada by the end of the twentieth century –becomes the grace and exhilaration of a single wooden craft under sail. Where and why this happens deserves closer scrutiny. This article finds a pattern of using references to the age of sail to convey economic opportunity—calling out all our resources and ingenuity—in concert with natural beauty and environmental resilience. This suggests that the tall ship has supplied an environmental alibi to our extractive economy. An alibi places us in another place, and in this case, another time. An icon of renewable energy (the wind-powered sailing ship) in a non-industrial setting (the wooden wharf or oceanic horizon) offers a visually appealing alternative to or stand-in for contemporary, unsustainable development (notably fossil fuels). This is, of course, the very essence of a usable past. While sailing ships have long been used to market Nova Scotia in tourism, this visual sleight-of-hand takes on a more insidious role in an era of accelerated offshore exploration and global climate change, when one generation of energy history is used to simultaneously represent, distract from, and license another. An antiquated technology becomes highly valuable as a rationalizing metaphor, one that supports quintessential industrial projects of growth by presenting an “Rising with the Tide of History” | 4 appealing, benign, and vaguely pre-industrial relationship with the natural world. It supplies a fictional timeline running parallel to our own, from past glory to future prosperity—rising again with the tide—without addressing the past or present of our industrial reality. Studying how nature has been depicted (in art, photography, or design) can reveal how nature has been seen in the past, or how people wanted to see nature in order to justify a desired relationship with, or use of, that nature. The images assembled here span a century of staged, promotional, public images created by corporations and different levels of government; between maps, photographs, and architectural plans; and most importantly, between message and landscape, between how a coastline is imagined and represented, and how it is used and occupied. It is the very eclecticism of these images, taken from across time and genre, that reveals the rhizomic commitment to resource capitalism, and the success of its alibi.7 It also undermines the notion that Atlantic Canada was excised from the prevailing arc of national development. In that narrative (by those at home and away), the east coast had served as a useful beachhead for empire, but after Confederation it became a foil to the country’s western and northern trajectory: excluded from and occasionally resentful of the defining industrial projects of grain and bitumen, and, wilting from outmigration, politically marginalized. Then, in the later part of the twentieth century, the region experienced several dramatic episodes that seemed to confirm the limits and unsustainability of an extractive resource economy. Coal mines were shuttered in the 1960s. The ground-fishery— which had attracted European fishers for five hundred years—was closed in 1992. The disastrous “tar ponds” in Sydney, Nova Scotia—pools of decades-old steel and mining waste that constituted the largest hazardous waste site in the country—drew national attention amid repeated clean-up Campbell | 5 Figure 3. Donald McRitchie, “And he passes by” (1926). Acc. 1900.007-RIT/142, Donald M. McRitchie fonds, Acadia University Archives. “Rising with the Tide of History” | 6 efforts. Atlantic Canada seemed to be leading the country into a post- industrial era, whether it liked it or not.8 The key word, though, is seemed. Atlantic Canada has remained as committed as any other region in Canada to exhorting “men with enterprise and capital”9 to develop its natural resources.